Animals Strike Curious Poses

"Yes, it’s a collection of essays. There’s a strand running clearly through almost all modern nature writers. It is, I think, respect for the notion of interconnectedness. But there is rarely any attempt to expound it. To get the ‘nature writing’ badge it’s generally thought to be enough simply to nod respectfully at the notion. Almost alone in modern nature writers of whom I know (Robert Macfarlane and Jay Griffiths are honourable exceptions) Passarello attempts a systematic anatomy of interconnectedness. Her foundational essay describes the emergence of a mammoth from the Siberian permafrost. The gist of her argument is that animal images crawl and prance and gallop through our ruling subconscious. They contribute importantly to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and about the wider world. We will function better if these animal images come out of our subconscious into our consciousness. “The wolf is St Francis-ised – the wolf is humanised. But St Francis is also wolved” On one level that’s a very trite thing to say. Darwin told us 150 years ago that we have furred and feathery and scaly faces just a few pages back in our family albums. But no one has described as eloquently as Passarello the place that animals have in our ruling collective unconscious. She makes it clear that there should be (for the health both of humans and animals) a vibrant reciprocity. St Francis looks after the wolf. And the wolf benefits. So the wolf is St Francis-ised – the wolf is humanised. But St Francis is also wolved. That’s what happens in any human relationships worth having. We need to abandon the idea of humans unilaterally ‘subduing’ the natural world. We need to be changed by it: to be subdued ourselves – or, better, humanised and vivified by it. If you go into a bookshop, there are loads of bookshelves with the heading: ‘ Birdwatching .’ It would be great if they were next to bookshelves headed ‘Being watched by birds’. That would put us properly in our place. That place would be a happy place to be. I think that is what Passarello’s book does. It tells us that for every twitcher looking through his binoculars at waders on a mudflat, there are tens of thousands of wader eyes looking in at us, and judging us with an antiquity which makes all our modern conceits look shallow, callow. Absolutely. What we have hubristically dubbed as our ‘creation’ is wholly and gloriously derivative. The tutor who has dictated all the lines in our best writing is the whole of the universe – in all the iterations that there have ever been."